Posts Tagged practice exam

Is your high school homeschooler ready for the PSAT exam? Usually this national exam (preliminary to the SAT – Scholastic Aptitude Test administered by the College Board) is taken during the sophomore year for practice and the junior year for the National Merit Scholarship qualifier. But your home school student can take it earlier than that if you think he or she would benefit from some advance practice.

One of my home school friends told me about a free PSAT practice exam and the amazing results her son achieved on the real PSAT as a result: he scored 20 points higher! This could be due to the fact that he had more learning experience under his belt or maybe he was just more familiar with the exam format so he felt less threatened. Or it could be that the questions on the real PSAT exam were easier, but I doubt it!

I decided to investigate and enrolled Meredith (almost 15 – freshman) in the free exam.  Meredith did really well in the language portion, but her math needs some shoring up. She’s about 1/3 of the way through Algebra 1, and she’s really insecure when it comes to closed book math exams, so that didn’t surprise me. The great thing about the free Princeton exam is that she can see exactly what areas she needs to work on. We have a great book, 100 Math Tips for the SAT, and How to Master Them Now! that she is using to systematically work through her weak areas.

One of the benefits of taking the PSAT and SAT practice exams is the time factor. Once you get your results back, you can work through the problems that you’ve missed over time instead of cramming at the last minute. What PSAT homeschooling tips or other free practice exams do you know about?

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